Rachel O'Brien
@reobrien
Environmental Engineer, Atmospheric Chemist, Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. they/she. opinions are my own.🌈
Super proud of all my students this summer! Justin and Willow are two great undergrads who presented their summer research during the SURE symposium last week.
We have a new visitor to our garden! It is amazing how gently it can glide over the flowers.
I hope the bees are doing ok with all the smoke up here. This is from the weekend, I see far fewer outside right now.
I'm very happy to share a new special issue in ES&T Air. "Indoor Air Chemistry in the Context of a Changing Climate" is now available: tinyurl.com/58yz7a5u This special issue was led by myself, Nicola Carslaw, and Yingjun Liu and we'd like to thank all the authors and reviewers who contributed!
There were many beautiful flowers in the SF botanical garden, but this was my favorite. Such a beautiful dark color and it smells like chocolate!
In California and I saw my first passion flower. What a crazy cool bloom!
The peony garden in Ann Arbor is beautiful! It rained last night so there were raindrops on the petals.
Heading home from MUOAA in Montréal. This was my first time in Quebec and I had a wonderful time! Big thanks to Thomas Preston, Miriam Freedman, Andreas Zuend, and @andrewpault.bsky.social for a great conference.
Excited to share our new work in ES&T Air! We developed a framework to quantify organic functional groups directly from HR-ToF-AMS data. This was a great team including Manjula Canagaratna and @hannahskenagy.bsky.social as well as Xu He, Yeaseul (Janie) Kim, and Adam Nix. Link: shorturl.at/4aZhH
A brief break in the rain let me grab some photos. I love how the droplets look on the petals of the tulips.
I love the colors you get when sunlight passes through tulip petals! 🌷
There's something wonderful about an orange kitty napping in the sun.
I'm so happy to see the crocuses opening up! It's also cool to see how much pollen some of them are producing.
It's March 1st and we have our first sign of spring! Early crocus blooms peeking out through the snow. #spring
This is really cool! I like how the atmospheric chemists have their own little cluster :) bluesky-map.theo.io
The face you make when you realize we are less than two weeks into 2026...
First bird photo of the year! A little tree sparrow paused briefly on a pile of dead reeds in the snow.